Abstract: Emoji began in 1999 in Japan. That’s when Japan’s three major telecom carriers—KDDI AU, SoftBank, and NTT-DoCoMo—created their first series of little graphics. But the system was rudimentary. Users could only text emoji to each other or send them through a specific email platform that only worked on mobile phones. And the telecom carriers hadn’t coordinated their code points, which left Japanese users on the constant brink of a social meltdown